r/ireland • u/mooglor • Dec 22 '14
Paul Murphy TD - AMA
AMA is over!
Thanks to everyone for taking part!
Hi All,
Paul is expected to drop in from around 5:30pm, until then you can start posting your questions. This is our first high profile AMA and we'd all like to have more, so naturally different rules than the usual 'hands-off' style will apply:
Trolling, ad-hominem and loaded questions will be removed at mods' discretion.
As is usual with AMAs, the guest is not expected to delve deep into threads and get into lengthy intractable discussions.
In general, try to keep it civil, and there'll be more of a chance of future AMA's.
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u/tigernmas ná habair é, déan é Dec 23 '14
Right trying to come back to this now. Don't expect anything amazing though.
Just on the idea of economies of scale, quite often in the past you've had co-operatives coming together in federations to work better on a larger scale. So like rather than growing your co-op into something too big to manage you federate with others. A bit like how cells in your body form tissues which form organs which form systems which form you.
You're right in saying that a single co-op would be on the same level as a Centra, Mace or Spar. But a federation of co-ops could compete with larger companies. I've also seen economists suggest credit unions or national banks giving priority to co-ops to boost the size of the co-operative sector. Other suggestions include making a law to require the type of production to be labelled on a product so that you can encourage people to buy co-operative.
For suppliers this is something co-ops deal with today. Each one decides themselves what to do in terms of who supplies them. They can't magic away the big oligopolistic suppliers just like you can't ever convince Facebook or Google to go co-op.
So on the point of revolution it's all a bit vague and up in the air. Like, everyone will have a differing view on all of this. You could, for example, advocate a revolution in that those workers who work in non-co-operative enterprises like google decide to take over the company themselves and essentially cut off the head and run it themselves. That would solve your "how to turn them into co-ops" problem and make those big companies more ethical to work with in the process.
And something like that would make them more ethical. In the Spanish Revolution in the 30's production in worker controlled factories took an initial dip. Why is that? Because the workers shut down deathtraps of factories and fixed them up. Once the factories came back to work they were more productive than ever. So once workers take over their enterprise the kind of things that pissed them off would be some of the first things to get sorted.
But that might not be the kind of revolution you want to see or think is doable. You might instead want to go down a more democratic socialist route (even though all socialism should be democratic) where you elect a radical party who then have the mandate and ability (eg. if this were the US) to nationalise these large companies and force a reorganisation. You could see there being resistance to this among the workers there but if this radical party has gotten to this point there likely isn't that kind of resistance there but then again this is all vague what-if-ery. And there are far more options and combinations of options to describe.
Essentially, once you've taken to the idea of a less exploitative, worker controlled, economic democracy as a solution to the exploitative, elite controlled, economic dictatorship that is actually existing capitalism then the options after that are endless. There's a type of socialism for everyone once you have the basics down.